Thirst

Vam­pire mythol­o­gy fol­lows the same puls­ing vein. Mys­te­ri­ous, angsty stranger with a taste for blood falls mad­ly in love with a timid, beau­ti­ful girl and must fight his urges to drag her into his death­ly world. Twi­light, True Blood and Let the Right One In proved that the blood­suck­er is still undead and kick­ing on screen. But trust us, for all its flaws, Old­boy direc­tor Park Chan-wook’s vam­pire romance leaves more jagged teeth-marks than any of them.

Kore­an super­star Song Kang-ho (most recent­ly seen in The Good, the Bad, the Weird) pro­vides a clas­sic Park pro­tag­o­nist: a man los­ing his mind and his soul. Gooey body-hor­ror kicks off the action as Song’s pure-heart­ed priest dies of a gris­ly skin dis­or­der after a failed med­ical exper­i­ment – only to be born again as a vam­pire with a heal­ing touch thanks to an infect­ed blood transfusion.

But as he trans­forms, so does Thirst, slid­ing gid­di­ly between ha-ha-aargh fun­ny, cere­bral the­mat­ics and schizoid eroti­cism. As priest becomes preda­tor, our anti-hero begins a bat­tle of moral­i­ty, mor­tal­i­ty and – most of all – the hot throb of doomed love in the shape of win­some house­wife Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), who turns out to have an even black­er taste for blood than him.

Red blood and black humour spurt hard as Thirst reveals itself to be one of the most deli­cious­ly skewed inci­sions into the vam­pire romance sub­genre. In fact, Park’s per­ver­si­ty is too much for the movie to han­dle. Thirst drags on way too long (a ludi­crous 133 min­utes) and spins out of con­trol in its cen­tral third.

It all tot­ters wild­ly between bizarro car­toon and Goth­ic tragedy, before rebal­anc­ing things for a fan­tas­tic final half hour of dead­ly games. Park’s eye for killer visu­al style is there, max­ing out in a scene of colour-coor­di­nat­ed car­nage in a white-wall apart­ment. But infect­ing every scene, it’s his grin­ning arte­r­i­al wit that makes the movie such a deli­cious feast, fea­tur­ing sex (weird and exhaust­ing), claret-slurp­ing (through a straw) and vio­lence (via a corkscrew).

Feel­ing that vibe big time is for­mer beau­ty queen Kim Ok-vin, who gives a fer­al, sexy, deliri­ous per­for­mance that proves a fan­tas­tic match for Song, as they prowl from love to hate and back again. ​“Vam­pires are cuter than I thought,” she decides. Mer­ci­ful­ly, she’s not talk­ing about Robert Pattinson.